Lab Partnering Service Discovery

Dr. Mark Bryden is the founding director of the Simulation, Modeling and Decision Science program at Ames Laboratory and is a professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State University. Dr. Bryden’s research is focused on the federation of information from disparate sources (e.g., models, data, and other information elements) to create detailed models of engineered, human, and natural systems that enable engineering decision making for these complex systems. Dr. Bryden has published more than 180 peer-reviewed articles and co-authored the textbook Combustion Engineering. He has founded two successful startups based on his research work, and he has founded the nonprofit ETHOS, a community of 150+ researchers focused on meeting the needs for clean village energy in the developing world. He has received three patents, three R&D 100 awards, two Regional Excellence in Technology Transfer awards, and a National Excellence in Technology Transfer award. In 2013 he and his coauthors received the ASME Melville Medal. His professional experience includes three years as an engineer and 11 years as a manager at Westinghouse Electric in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In addition, for more than 15 years Professor Bryden has worked on energy systems for the poor in a number of developing countries. 

David C. Miller is the senior fellow for Process Systems Engineering and Analysis at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) where he leads the Institute for the Design of Advanced Energy Systems (IDAES), a collaboration among researchers from NETL, Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, and West Virginia University, that is developing next generation process systems engineering tools for the identification, synthesis, optimization and analysis of innovative advanced energy systems at scales ranging from process to system to market.

Previously, he served as the Technical Director of the Carbon Capture Simulation Initiative (CCSI) leading a team of over 100 researchers from five national laboratories and five universities. He recently led the transition of CCSI to a second phase which is applying the CCSI computational approaches to reduce technical risk while accelerating the scale up of new carbon capture technologies.

Dr. Miller is a recipient of the Arthur S. Flemming Award for Exceptional Federal Service, Applied Science and Engineering.

Prior to joining NETL, Dr. Miller spent a decade in academia, rising to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. He earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from The Ohio State University.

Dr. John D. Siirola is a Principal R&D Member of Technical Staff in the Discrete Math and Optimization Department within the Center for Computing Research at Sandia National Laboratories. His main areas of expertise are systems design, operations research, optimization modeling, and optimization algorithms. John’s research focuses on the intersection of computational tools with systems design and analysis; in particular, developing approaches for modeling highly structured systems, and optimization algorithms that can exploit the expressed structure.

Much of John’s research is disseminated through open-source software projects. He is the Sandia PI for the Institute for the Design of Advanced Energy Systems (process modeling, design, and optimization) and serves on the Pyomo Management Committee (optimization modeling). Previously he led the Acro project (optimization algorithms) and contributed to the Water Security Toolkit (modeling and analysis tools for drinking water distribution systems), Dakota (optimization and uncertainty quantification), Utilib, PyUtilib, gcovr, and cxxtest.

John has a B.S. from Purdue University (2000) and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University (2005), both in Chemical Engineering. He is a senior member of the AIChE, member of INFORMS, and member of the COIN-OR Foundation. John currently serves on the COIN-OR Technical Leadership Council and co-chaired the 2014 Foundations of Computer Aided Process Design (FOCAPD) conference.